AMAZON.COM BOOK REVIEW

I can empathize with the person who wrote this. I've read countless books, for school, that have left me wondering: What does this have to do with anything?

The book is "Music: A Very Short Introduction" by Nicholas Cook. Now I like Nicholas Cook (see my comments below), but I understand the sentiment of this review. The review is titled "If you want to know about music, don't buy this book."

Nicholas Cook's book is mistitled. If you want to understand music, it would be better to buy either The Classical Style by Charles Rosen or Aaron Copland's book, What to Listen for in Music, or some other books that would teach you music and not some messed up philosophy of man's making.

The things he said in chapter seven were absurd and disgusting. These things have nothing to do with understanding or appreciating music. This book is not worth reading. The things in this book are not worth thinking about. Your time would be better spent on other things.

I'm sorry that my professor even had this book on the booklist to read. Thirty years ago this book would have never been allowed to be printed, let alone allowed in a classroom.

This book isn't worth the one star I gave it.

Although I haven't read the book this review is discussing, I'm currently reading "A Guide to Musical Analysis" (also by Nicholas Cook) and loving it. My best guess is that "Music: A Very Short Introduction" is not about music, but rather about what recent theorists have said about music. It's not music history, strictly speaking. It's a survey of contemporary musicology.

As time goes on, I'm becoming more open-minded to new trends in liberal scholarship. I just finished "Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology," a seminal work that led to the adoption of Queer Theory in the music academy. Can I say that I liked it? Well, no. Can I say that I agreed with it—or that I agreed with its political overtones, its moralizing, its "queer" reinterpretations of music history? Again, no. Then what can I say? Well. It's an important book, all the same, and I'm thankful for having read it.

I've went too far in my past critiques of the liberal academy. Part of this is due to unbalance in the standard Liberal Arts curriculum (one semester: four books by Michel Foucault? Really??). Part of this was due to youthful polemics. Part of this was due to reading turgid, overly dense prose. Part of this was due to a loss in perspective. I remember, not too along ago, when college kids my age started talking about postmodernism. Was it good? Was it bad? What was it? No one seemed to know. Some of us stayed confused. Some of us learned. Most of us took sides. What few of us did was really get inside postmodern thinking. There were (mostly unsophisticated) cries of relativism on all sides. There were too few attempts at real understanding. This was a mistake. Postmodern theorists are serious people, for the most part. They deserve a fair hearing. In the past I was not always charitable enough to understand what was being said. I ought to have listened harder.

And yet I empathize with the reviewer above. His language is over the top, but he raises a good question. Is the music classroom primarily a place to talk about music? That is, to consider music as our object first and foremost? Or is the classroom a site for advocacy, a platform for advancing various political proposals, be them feminist, gay, racial, or otherwise?

Like most new liberals, I consider claims to pure objectivity to be lacking. Music can and sometimes is taught in straight, white, male-centered fashion. Unlike the new liberals, however, I don't think the classroom is a place for ideological dissemination in the first place. Granted, we do not study the operas of Benjamin Britten while ignoring the fact he was gay. Nor do we study jazz while ignoring the racial prejudices that underlie its origins and development. There is a difference, though, between a racial or sexual politics, and the art that is informed by them. I'm not against smuggling ones worldview into the classroom. This will happen regardless. I am against redrawing the terrain; against turning classrooms into places where subjects aren't talked about, but talked around instead.

-murrayjames 10/30/09


SHORT FITS OF BRILLIANCE
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